Introduction to ASP.NET MVC – slides and demo project

I had a presentation last week at MS DevDays Bulgaria and I thought I’d share it with you.

I was very excited and somewhat nervous - this was my first presentation ever. Nervousness aside, the feeling cannot be compared to anything else – I was glad there are so much people out there who are curious about the topic I’m interested in. It’s a kind of a win-win situation, where the attendees learn something new or see the things from another person’s point of view and the presenter learns even more on the topic from the questions the audience asks.

Back to the topic:

Attached are the few slides. As I emphasized most of the code specifics during the demo, I’ll add some more information hereby:

• The application demonstrates a small forum site. As a model it uses a simple Linq-to-SQL object. The things I stressed were:
• The declarative approach of specifying routes in the global.asax file;
• The locations where views are searched (the
  Views/[ControllerName]
  folder and the
  Views/Shared
  folder)
• The
  ViewPage
  class and its
  ViewData
  property;
• The
  Html
  property of the
  ViewPage
  class (an instance of
  HtmlHelper
  ), providing a way to have correct URLs even if the requirement for the URL structure is changed:
  • The
    ActionLink
    method;
• The
  Form
  method;
• The
  BindingHelperExtensions
  , which can be very helpful when we have a lot of user input to be passed to an object;
• The ease of writing tests (that became even easier with the latest release) and the red-green testing method.

P.S. Recently Troy Goode published a very useful ASP.Net MVC Membership Starter Kit you might find interesting.

Cheers,